Hot Hot and then More Hot
Dear Readers,
It has been a month full of troubles, first my cellphone gets stolen, then the weather turns hot, then my asthma which is usually worse in the summer months kicks in with a full force. We empty the one shed with all my former moved things in it, my room turns to chaos. Dad replaces the floor in the shed, with the walls still standing. Most of the place was rearranged, a few dozen books were trashed as they suffered with water damage, as the floor of shed was known to get wet, it was on the list of things to do, but got shoved off the top several times for several different and at the time valid reasons. Most of the books damaged weren't the books I'd cry over. I am a collector of old tomes of distant learning, like 1900's knowledge books, found in most older libraries or school collections of the previous decades. Well some of those books are in a compost heap today.
Hot is the name of the game for just about everyone south of Nome, sighs, I don't like hot weather that much, or is it that I hate being cough, cough, cough half the day. The humidity is such that a small heat engine could suck a lot of water out of the air. Like those water devices you can now buy, where you plug them in and then you get filtered water in a few days by the gallons.
Most of you folks with air conditioning have such devices. In fact make sure that your condensation drip line is put to good use, start collecting that for your gardens, or some other use please. There are methods to some of the madness we live in to get out of it. I know that not everyone has A/C that reads this blog, but if you do, gather that moisture and use it for something rather than just dripping out the sewers.
My dad has pointed out that if he could work it out, he'd use tub water for a water source, and sink water too, as yet it is a project on a far back burner, but it something any home designer has to think about, even though some areas you can't do that unless you rig up the system yourself, laws and all that being what they are in some areas.
I have been working on my prefect house design, It has for decades been centered on a footprint of a 15 foot by 15 foot room. It was my living room in Mississippi State when I lived off campus, on big room like a loft apartment all it's own 15 feet on a side and 11.5 feet tall. There was a fiberboard of some sort on the walls over a hardwood lattice work that was the under wall, so I had good mounting abilities and did a lot with the room as far as putting display shelves for my vast bottle collection, which at the time of my move leaving the place was over 2,500 bottles. Some of which I still have a huge part of at least the small ones or the favorite and fancy ones I hope. I know I gave away about 50 to 75 of them to someone in Huntsville, recycled about 300 of them but still there are boxes and boxes of them unseen for 20 years. Most of them are still worth something to someone besides myself, but maybe only if I gather them all up and get some other collector to give me a small chunk of change for them. Something I might get a chance to look into in another decade or so, that is how far down on the list that item is placed.
Anyway back to my house design. I finally decided to add a cellar to the design, as not all houses have to be above ground and this will allow me to design a boat like dwelling something that would float if the area around here had an earthquake. I am used to living in a house under 900 square feet, have been off and on for 35 years. Though most of the living space would be considered filled to the brim, I never saw walls that I did not try to use as shelf space or something like that. My bedroom has glow in the dark paint on every flat wall surface and the ceiling, and I have darkened it so that whenever it is night or dark enough the stars come out. Right now people would find the space a bit filled as I have hung several strings of threads to objects like toy cars and small bottles , those little 50 ml bottles I have a lot of have gotten several new display styles going for them. It was a display Orange but about the size of a soccer ball, and it is hanging over by the air vent like a planet and has been hooked into the cabling overhead so that the sky has cable cars that are hung there for added oddities. Maybe they will get taken down when the summer is over or maybe the space will get fuller, as I also found my glow in the dark beads and threading material, some of which I have to get to a friend so she can have some stars in her sky too.
Oh by the way I met a guy named Chris at the Rev Room the other day that said he was a local winemaker and he was showing me his garden's picture. Hey Chris if you can lets get back together and exchange more ideas, tomatoes are great but can you live off them? I know that the raised beds are mostly a must in our soils, but have you tried french double digging to move some of the subsoil up so that over time you can get a better soil deeper down. Oh and do you happen to use rice hulls as a source of soil carbon and fluffiness? Oh and other questions, but I guess they will have to wait till I see you again.
I was also working on several plans for small spaces of growing things with as many uses for the vertical as well as the horizontal as I could think of using. Using north facing spaces for fruit trees that are laddered and shortened so that you get better space per tree. Over the top systems of hanging planters that can aid in shading for hot weather or just using the overhead spaces that are there to use like you would in a greenhouse. My earlier thinking of 400 sq feet per month has been honed down to 900 sq feet overall with several experiments still needing to be tested. I know there is the guy on Youtube that has the parking lot greenhouse spaces that uses fish as the basement of a 2 to 3 tier growing system and gets huge results. So this isn't hard it is thinking outside the boxes we have put ourselves into that is the key.
We aren't short of food, we are short on getting that food to the people that need it. We live in an industrial food culture that says we have to grow it on huge tracts of land and do it with labor saving machines, only to see the farm waste run into the millions of tons every year and not even get to people's tables. We have people that if it is not in a box in the store they can't cook it. We have nations that can't get the crops to the people because of a political stumbling block not a supply problem. Over and over we have tons of waste and not a lot of getting the food to where the people are or in a fresh enough form so that they are getting more of the vitamins in the crops.
Somewhere in all this we can get better at getting food to where it needs to go or grow more food where the people are at or move people around so that growing food and people are in the same local places. We can grow food wherever there is light and we can get light even underground, or in space. People have been talking about floating man made islands for years we aren't limited to land, we never were.
Most of the world's problems stem from one group hating another group or wanting land for their own, something tied to greed. I can understand greed, I like to collect a lot of things, and you get to a point where you literally run out of space to put things, so you are faced with your own wants and needs and have to give up the wants and just deal with the needs. But we don't need greed, or hate, though we might be stuck with them till people can work on getting along better.
One thing this whole Biowebscape Design process is about is figuring out things that can be gained through the systems we have in place and to rework the product streams so that less waste and more useful outcomes can be garnered with what we do have. Labor is needed to feed people if they are all growing their own food and getting little of it from the stores and mega-farms of today. But not every product we have today is bad. Which ones do we want to keep and which ones can go by the wayside into some reusable product stream so as not to be wasted in the city dump or worse yet poured on the ground and wasting our environment to the point that only the odd creatures in nature can deal with, but not the standard ones we normally think of as life. Like so many other people out their in the design world I have a lot of ideas and even have a small following, but this is not the end of the process, only the beginning.
Well Off to cough another day, and see if I can drain another barrel to water the garden, or have I hit rock bottom on that already.
Christ's peace to you all.
Charles.
It has been a month full of troubles, first my cellphone gets stolen, then the weather turns hot, then my asthma which is usually worse in the summer months kicks in with a full force. We empty the one shed with all my former moved things in it, my room turns to chaos. Dad replaces the floor in the shed, with the walls still standing. Most of the place was rearranged, a few dozen books were trashed as they suffered with water damage, as the floor of shed was known to get wet, it was on the list of things to do, but got shoved off the top several times for several different and at the time valid reasons. Most of the books damaged weren't the books I'd cry over. I am a collector of old tomes of distant learning, like 1900's knowledge books, found in most older libraries or school collections of the previous decades. Well some of those books are in a compost heap today.
Hot is the name of the game for just about everyone south of Nome, sighs, I don't like hot weather that much, or is it that I hate being cough, cough, cough half the day. The humidity is such that a small heat engine could suck a lot of water out of the air. Like those water devices you can now buy, where you plug them in and then you get filtered water in a few days by the gallons.
Most of you folks with air conditioning have such devices. In fact make sure that your condensation drip line is put to good use, start collecting that for your gardens, or some other use please. There are methods to some of the madness we live in to get out of it. I know that not everyone has A/C that reads this blog, but if you do, gather that moisture and use it for something rather than just dripping out the sewers.
My dad has pointed out that if he could work it out, he'd use tub water for a water source, and sink water too, as yet it is a project on a far back burner, but it something any home designer has to think about, even though some areas you can't do that unless you rig up the system yourself, laws and all that being what they are in some areas.
I have been working on my prefect house design, It has for decades been centered on a footprint of a 15 foot by 15 foot room. It was my living room in Mississippi State when I lived off campus, on big room like a loft apartment all it's own 15 feet on a side and 11.5 feet tall. There was a fiberboard of some sort on the walls over a hardwood lattice work that was the under wall, so I had good mounting abilities and did a lot with the room as far as putting display shelves for my vast bottle collection, which at the time of my move leaving the place was over 2,500 bottles. Some of which I still have a huge part of at least the small ones or the favorite and fancy ones I hope. I know I gave away about 50 to 75 of them to someone in Huntsville, recycled about 300 of them but still there are boxes and boxes of them unseen for 20 years. Most of them are still worth something to someone besides myself, but maybe only if I gather them all up and get some other collector to give me a small chunk of change for them. Something I might get a chance to look into in another decade or so, that is how far down on the list that item is placed.
Anyway back to my house design. I finally decided to add a cellar to the design, as not all houses have to be above ground and this will allow me to design a boat like dwelling something that would float if the area around here had an earthquake. I am used to living in a house under 900 square feet, have been off and on for 35 years. Though most of the living space would be considered filled to the brim, I never saw walls that I did not try to use as shelf space or something like that. My bedroom has glow in the dark paint on every flat wall surface and the ceiling, and I have darkened it so that whenever it is night or dark enough the stars come out. Right now people would find the space a bit filled as I have hung several strings of threads to objects like toy cars and small bottles , those little 50 ml bottles I have a lot of have gotten several new display styles going for them. It was a display Orange but about the size of a soccer ball, and it is hanging over by the air vent like a planet and has been hooked into the cabling overhead so that the sky has cable cars that are hung there for added oddities. Maybe they will get taken down when the summer is over or maybe the space will get fuller, as I also found my glow in the dark beads and threading material, some of which I have to get to a friend so she can have some stars in her sky too.
Oh by the way I met a guy named Chris at the Rev Room the other day that said he was a local winemaker and he was showing me his garden's picture. Hey Chris if you can lets get back together and exchange more ideas, tomatoes are great but can you live off them? I know that the raised beds are mostly a must in our soils, but have you tried french double digging to move some of the subsoil up so that over time you can get a better soil deeper down. Oh and do you happen to use rice hulls as a source of soil carbon and fluffiness? Oh and other questions, but I guess they will have to wait till I see you again.
I was also working on several plans for small spaces of growing things with as many uses for the vertical as well as the horizontal as I could think of using. Using north facing spaces for fruit trees that are laddered and shortened so that you get better space per tree. Over the top systems of hanging planters that can aid in shading for hot weather or just using the overhead spaces that are there to use like you would in a greenhouse. My earlier thinking of 400 sq feet per month has been honed down to 900 sq feet overall with several experiments still needing to be tested. I know there is the guy on Youtube that has the parking lot greenhouse spaces that uses fish as the basement of a 2 to 3 tier growing system and gets huge results. So this isn't hard it is thinking outside the boxes we have put ourselves into that is the key.
We aren't short of food, we are short on getting that food to the people that need it. We live in an industrial food culture that says we have to grow it on huge tracts of land and do it with labor saving machines, only to see the farm waste run into the millions of tons every year and not even get to people's tables. We have people that if it is not in a box in the store they can't cook it. We have nations that can't get the crops to the people because of a political stumbling block not a supply problem. Over and over we have tons of waste and not a lot of getting the food to where the people are or in a fresh enough form so that they are getting more of the vitamins in the crops.
Somewhere in all this we can get better at getting food to where it needs to go or grow more food where the people are at or move people around so that growing food and people are in the same local places. We can grow food wherever there is light and we can get light even underground, or in space. People have been talking about floating man made islands for years we aren't limited to land, we never were.
Most of the world's problems stem from one group hating another group or wanting land for their own, something tied to greed. I can understand greed, I like to collect a lot of things, and you get to a point where you literally run out of space to put things, so you are faced with your own wants and needs and have to give up the wants and just deal with the needs. But we don't need greed, or hate, though we might be stuck with them till people can work on getting along better.
One thing this whole Biowebscape Design process is about is figuring out things that can be gained through the systems we have in place and to rework the product streams so that less waste and more useful outcomes can be garnered with what we do have. Labor is needed to feed people if they are all growing their own food and getting little of it from the stores and mega-farms of today. But not every product we have today is bad. Which ones do we want to keep and which ones can go by the wayside into some reusable product stream so as not to be wasted in the city dump or worse yet poured on the ground and wasting our environment to the point that only the odd creatures in nature can deal with, but not the standard ones we normally think of as life. Like so many other people out their in the design world I have a lot of ideas and even have a small following, but this is not the end of the process, only the beginning.
Well Off to cough another day, and see if I can drain another barrel to water the garden, or have I hit rock bottom on that already.
Christ's peace to you all.
Charles.
posted by Charles Edward Owens Jr. at 9:21 AM
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